Nowhere is it written that book publishing is a democracy. Strong, imperious personalities have ruled much of it from the beginning and continue to do so, whether by charm or intimidation or both. Look at the house that Alfred built. Judith Jones, a distinguished editor who has worked at Knopf since 1957, once recalled in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly that under Alfred and Blanche, "the staff were like footballs that were tossed back and forth between them." The style of Bob Gottlieb, their successor, as Korda recalls from his own early days working under this Wunderkind when Gottlieb was editor in chief at S&S, was to choose his "loved ones" and be "a benevolent autocrat." Gottlieb himself told PW that he proposed Sonny Mehta as his successor at Knopf in part because of Mehta's "very strong individual temperament and personal distinction."

Of course, as they say, it all starts with the book. But what the Cerfs and Schusters of this world perhaps unknowingly set in motion--and what later generations, with a far more single-minded self-awareness, would complete--was a sea change that turned the central focus and power base within book publishing from the editorial to the marketing sphere. The unapologetic, coolheaded cynicism that pokes its head through Korda's bubbly stories and that no doubt goes some way toward explaining how he's managed to survive for so long at the top makes this abundantly clear. "Many of the most successful people in book publishing hardly like books at all and very seldom read one," he tells us, while assuring us he is not among them.

In this rather novelistic memoir, Korda is eager to have his reader know that although he joined their ranks, he also stands apart from Snyder and the rest: Born to an English mother and a Hungarian Jewish father who was one of the famous Korda brothers dominating the British film business in the years before and after the Second World War, young Michael grew up knowing movie stars and money (without, he says, knowing that he was half Jewish), and he absorbed by osmosis the "class" of his Swiss boarding school and Oxford education.

In much of the book, Korda fluidly lets himself play Nick Carraway to Snyder's Gatsby--or to other versions, like that of superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar or novelist Jacqueline Susann. But Korda absorbed too much of the movie business at a very early age not to want to play the star in his own right. And so he also tells us about his other career--spawning bestselling commercial novels like Queenie (a fictionalized portrait of his aunt Merle Oberon) and self-help juggernauts like Power! What comes across most powerfully--to echo the title of an earlier memoir, which he devoted to his family--is that Michael Korda has led a charmed life in American book publishing. Unfortunately, not everybody who's been in the business during those same decades has been so lucky.

A couple of times Korda pushes his charm and his luck a little too far--for this reader, anyway. A kind of disingenuousness intrudes into some stories, and what is supposed to be funny becomes rather cruel. For example, having already told us of the peculiar eccentricities of Irving Lazar, the Lysol-laced denouement to a story about Jesse Jackson's visit to the agent is gratuitous and in bad taste. And, knowing of Ronald Reagan's decline due to Alzheimer's disease, it would have been kinder if Korda had left out his anecdote involving the former President's hankering after a chocolate-chip cookie. In a book that is generally more elegant, such things are cheap shots.

Korda's forty years in publishing have witnessed tectonic shifts in the industry, some of which have pushed prominent editors to the wayside and caused others to quit. Even an editor as powerful and highly regarded as Bob Gottlieb was not immune. Gottlieb was quoted in PW as saying about his 1986 departure from Knopf, "I saw it change from a publishing business to a marketing business, and I didn't like it for me."

The Gottlieb days at S&S, Korda says, taught him that enthusiasm and energy were the currency of book publishing. They still are, only, with the proliferation of more and more layers of buzz and hype, it has gotten somewhat harder to distinguish the fake from the real, even for those purveying the coinage.

Much of that buzz and hype is filtered through or amplified by television. Hand in hand with the shift in the balance of publishing power has been the tremendous growth in the electronic medium's influence on the whole process. Korda, himself no stranger to the magazine and talk shows, goes so far as to assert that "the biggest revolution in the book business has been brought about by the curious symbiosis that established itself between television's need for free talent and the need of book publishers to reach the public." And again, "television, which everybody had expected would destroy book publishing, in fact saved and reinvented it."

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